"The Heritage Foundation (abbreviated to Heritage) is an American conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. The foundation took a leading role in the conservative movement during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose policies were taken from Heritage's policy study Mandate for Leadership." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation
In what way is it a political propaganda piece? From what I can tell it's a pretty transparent ranking of countries by factors that the organisation cares about.
While the Scandinavian countries have high taxes and regulated labour markets, they have deregulated markets, strong property protections and are very simple to do business in.
And they don't even define what their categories mean. I'm willing to bet that "labor freedom" to them means "right-to-work" and no minimum wage, for example. In any case, without proper measurable definitions, they can easily manipulate their index to say whatever they want.
But that's not my point. My point is only that there are aspects of a typical free market economy (by American right wing definitions) that are better represented in countries other than the US.
[0] https://www.heritage.org/index/pdf/2023/book/2023_IndexOfEco...